


The Chair

by TheSaddleman



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Chairs, F/M, Fluff, Friendship, Humour, IKEA, Series 8 Twelfth Doctor, gruff Doctor, whouffaldi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-22
Updated: 2018-02-22
Packaged: 2019-03-22 17:37:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13769139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSaddleman/pseuds/TheSaddleman
Summary: Only a few weeks after his regeneration, the Twelfth Doctor and Clara Oswald find themselves in one of their greatest adventures yet ... to buy a chair.





	The Chair

**Author's Note:**

> This piece of (slightly dark) fluff is set between "Into the Dalek" and "Robot of Sherwood" and is directly inspired by the opening TARDIS scene in "Robot" in which Clara is seen relaxing in a piece of furniture never seen previously. 
> 
> As this is set in early Series 8, this is my first proper attempt at telling a story featuring early Twelve, not long after he pushed Clara away at the end of "Deep Breath" and soon after Clara began to turn to Danny for what the Doctor was no longer willing or able to give her. This is before we began to get episodes like "Time Heist" or even "Robot of Sherwood" where it began to be clear that "Whouffaldi" was actually still bubbling under the surface. As such, however, you'll find the tone of the relationship differs from what you may be used to in other stories I've written, most of which take place in the Series 9 (or 9-10) timeframe.

“Doctor, the time has come,” Clara Oswald said one morning in the TARDIS, a few months after the Time Lord had transformed from a young, bow tie-wearing man into an older, rather stern-faced, magician-outfit-wearing man. A man who now leaned over the TARDIS console and had not cast eyes on her for at least ten minutes as he tried to … actually, she wasn’t sure _what_ he was trying to do.

“For what?” the Doctor called back. “For you to admit that I was right and Guido shooting first was a bad idea?”

“What? No, no. First, it was _Greedo_ shooting first…”

“You sure?” 

“Positive. I just didn’t think it was a big deal.”

“Oh, it was a big deal. As I told George-”

Clara grimaced and cut him off. “We’ll just have to agree to disagree.” Distracted now, she scratched her head. “What was I talking about? Oh, yeah, I’ve decided I know where I want us to go next.”

“Anywhere you want. Just name it,” the Doctor said. For the first time in a half hour, he actually showed a bit of excitement. He even smiled at her a little bit. Would wonders never cease.

“Ikea,” Clara said. 

The Doctor frowned. “Ikea? What constellation is it in? How do you spell it?” He took his place next to the keyboard.

“It’s spelled D-U-M-M-Y. You know full well it’s a shop. We’re buying a chair for the console room.”

The Doctor pointed to the second level of the chamber, gruffly. “Already have a chair.” Sure enough, next to a lamp, there sat the comfortable-looking reading chair he’d dug out when he redecorated the TARDIS after his regeneration. In fact, he had found the dark-coloured suit with red lining he now favoured draped over the back.

“I mean for down here,” Clara said. “We stand around all the time, there’s no place to sit, there’s only room for one in that dinosaur, and I’m not interested in lugging a chair half a mile from your Chair Room.”

“I don’t have a Chair Room,” the Doctor grumped back.

“You have a Jelly Baby Room, but you don’t have a Chair Room?”

“One’s a food group, the other isn’t.”

“Jelly babies aren’t … never mind. I’d like to go to Ikea to get a chair for the console room, please.”

“Why do we need a chair?”

“Because when we come back from an adventure, or you pick me up after a long day at school, sometimes I’d like a sit-down.”

The Doctor pointed at the steps leading up to the upper level. And then at another set of steps leading down into the access corridor.

“My dry-cleaning bills are bad enough without me having to sit on the floor. I just mean something we can have by the console for when my legs get wobbly.”

“There’s nothing wrong with your legs,” the Doctor said. 

Clara cocked her eyebrow.

“That’s not what I meant,” he said, a little sharply. 

Not for the first time in recent weeks, Clara wondered what it would take to get a rise out of this Doctor, who was still so much an unknown quantity to her. The previous Doctor, the one who wore the bow tie and hugged her at every opportunity, would have come back with some tongue-in-cheek remark or a cocked eyebrow of his own. He certainly wouldn’t have taken a sharpish tone like that. But this new man … was he actually offended at her picking up on a clearly unintended double entendre, or was that nervousness coming through? What would it take?

Missing the invitation to provide a punchline to a silly joke that wouldn’t even rate a deleted scene on a Carry On DVD was minor, but there had been other moments where Clara had debated whether choosing to stay with the Doctor had been wise, despite Bow Tie Doctor asking her to. The adventure did not always make up for the fact that he was rude, for one thing, often casting disparaging remarks towards her, sometimes in the same sentence in which he was praising her. There were other times where he treated her more like a student than a friend. Not long after his regeneration, he’d asked her if she thought he was a good man; she gave a non-committal response at the time because she honestly didn’t know. She did feel he was a good man, but these days she often considered asking him if he still considered her a friend, or just a legacy. And did any, er, other feelings survive the regeneration?

She hadn’t worked up the courage to tell him about Danny yet, either. With Bow Tie, Clara felt … she felt that she had a future with him. She would have willingly lived out her life on Trenzalore with him, but he’d sent her away (probably for that very reason). But now ... she needed someone to talk to. Someone who wouldn’t dismiss her concerns with a handwave. Someone who actually gave a damn for other people rather than making jokes about innocent people being liquefied by a Dalek.

She’d met other Doctors, and she knew how the regeneration thing worked. But this time, Clara honestly felt the Doctor was no longer the man she’d fallen in-

“Are you just going to stare at me all day, or are you going to pick an Ikea?” the Doctor said.

***

Clara had randomly chosen an Ikea in Calgary, Canada (in part because she had a sneaking suspicion she was going to be stuck with the bill and wanted to make sure it was in a place where she was guaranteed she could use her credit card). The TARDIS materialized in a quiet corner of the store; as they exited, the Doctor hung a sign on the handle:

_**Display model only. Not for sale.** _

“Doctor, I thought you had a perception filter that made the TARDIS invisible to most people,” Clara said.

“Never underestimate the bargain-hunter,” he said. “They’ll see through anything.”

As they wound their way through the store, Clara found herself having to stop the Doctor from wandering off, his attention attracted by some oddly shaped piece of furniture, or his curiosity over why, if this store was located in the heartland of Canada, why all the books on display appeared to be in Swedish. 

“Focus, Doctor. We’re on a mission,” she said more than once.

“I heard you the first time,” the Doctor replied more than once.

Eventually, they found their way to the chairs. The Doctor waited impatiently as Clara tried out several models. Some were too high and difficult to adjust for her petite frame. Some were too low and likewise—even though the Doctor made it clear that he had no intention of ever using the chair himself.

“I have superior Time Lord physiology, Clara. I have little need to rest.”

“Says the man I saw fall sound asleep standing up by the console last week,” Clara replied as she sat down in another display model that was so low, she needed the Doctor to help pull her out.

“I wasn’t sleeping, Clara. I was … meditating.”

“Do you usually snore when you meditate?”

“That wasn’t snoring, that was me chanting in Venusian.”

“No it wasn’t.”

“Oh? Happen to know any Venusians, do you?”

Clara stuck out her tongue and then her eyes widened as she spied The Chair.

You never can predict what will appeal to somebody. Sometimes, the simplest-looking of objects will attract the eye more than a thing covered in bells and whistles and neon lights. In this case, it was a swivel chair—not much more than a stool with a back support, to be honest—that at first glance wouldn’t seem too out of place in a school science lab. Clara hopped on and gave it a spin. The spinning caused the chair to rise and lower, so it only took a moment for the height to be perfect for her, and the product information tag indicated that spinning it in the opposite direction would result in a comfortable fit for someone of the Doctor’s stature, as well. And the height of the backrest was just right, too.

“This is the one,” Clara announced.

“Looks rather plain, don’t you think?” the Doctor said.

“I think it’s adorable. And when we get it ho-, er, to the TARDIS, I don’t want you fiddling about with your sonic screwdriver for any purpose other than as a substitute in case the Allen key falls on the floor and through the grill. I don’t want to have the thing suddenly talking to me and making remarks about my weight, my height, the weather, or the politics on Proxima Centauri, got it?”

“Yes, boss.”

Fortunately, the chair came fully assembled, so the Doctor was able to resist the urge to improve its design. And, yes, Clara did end up having to pay for it since the only credit card the Doctor possessed wasn’t scheduled to go active until 2026. But, in the end, she’d still been successful. There was now a chair next to the console in the TARDIS.

Ironically, Clara didn’t have too much (or any) opportunity to enjoy the thing for the next few days, as the Doctor’s navigational skills, that had more-or-less accurately taken them from London in 2014 to Calgary in 2015, regressed slightly and they ended up on some alien world where they spent the next week trying to rescue a bunch of alien kids that had crashed their shuttle inside a Cybermen base. (The Doctor claimed it was the result of the TARDIS taking him where he needed to go again; Clara assumed he’d just gotten his sums wrong.) And then, once they’d rescued the kids, the Doctor goofed once more, landing the TARDIS at Coal Hill School not the night before class, but five minutes _after_ Clara was supposed to start teaching a unit on H.G. Wells. 

Clara barely had time to take a quick shower before running for the door, her mind coming up with what excuse she’d use this time to explain her TARDIness (while also admonishing herself to stop capitalizing the word “tardiness” in her mind that way; it was funny the first dozen times).

“OK, Doctor, I’m off. See you next week?” she asked. The Doctor didn’t even look at her as he waved. “Bye, then,” she said sadly. Par for the course. Oh well, there was always Danny.

Clara was halfway across the supply closet before she realized she’d left her bag behind. Thankful that the Doctor hadn’t immediately dematerialized the ship, she opened the TARDIS door.

And that’s when she heard the laughter.

Quizzically, she advanced inside. She barely was able to stifle her own chuckle as she saw the Doctor, on the chair, spinning it around like a little kid on a playground carousel. Once the chair had reached the bottom, with the Doctor’s legs splayed out, he started spinning it in the opposite direction. More laughter.

Quietly, so as not to attract his attention, Clara took her bag and headed for the exit again.

Outside, she finally let a laugh ring through the small room. 

For just a moment, she had truly seen the Doctor— _her_ Doctor—again. Not the grumpy, insulty, stern man he had become after Trenzalore, but the joyful, laughing, full-of-life man she had come to care for. 

It was true, the Doctor was no longer the man she had fallen in love with. And no, Clara was still uncertain as to where she stood with him now. Maybe her future did lie with Danny after all, even though they’d yet to even have their first proper date—or maybe with somebody else. 

But, in that one moment, that one brief, silly moment, seeing the Doctor childishly enjoying himself with a swivel chair … Clara knew she would never be able to close the door on the Doctor, her wonderful, clever boy.

And maybe, just maybe, there was still hope for them, after all.

**Author's Note:**

> I chose to set this story between "Into the Dalek" - an episode where the Doctor annoyed Clara so much that she actually slapped him - and "Robot of Sherwood," not just because that's when we saw Clara spinning around on the chair featured in this story, but also because that was the episode that started the long process of the Doctor's thawing, while Clara's attitude towards him also noticeably softened. Although "Deep Breath" had ended with the Doctor confirming in canon that his previous self saw Clara as his girlfriend, with the hint that those feelings were still in place, "Into the Dalek" was an outlier of an episode, during which it was easy to feel that Steven Moffat had truly decided to abandon the idea of the Doctor being in love with Clara; a new love was introduced in the form of Danny instead. He was going to be the next Rory Williams, right? After all, Missy was introduced in "Deep Breath," claiming the Doctor as her boyfriend. The math isn't hard to work out.
> 
> Until one line of dialogue in "Time Heist" - "Beat that for a date" - unravelled everything and (re)launched the SS Whouffaldi.
> 
> So this story is set during this awkward transitional phase. But in my story I end things on a hopeful note, setting things up for the future. I hope you found it interesting.


End file.
